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IPv6 is coming – albeit slowly. While the core Internet is IPv6-capable, getting that plumbed all the way through to your system, be it at home, in your company’s data center, or in a cloud offering, is still elusive. When waiting isn’t an option, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 has proven viable, at least for light uses.

Since 2006, I’ve been using the tunnel service provided by SixXS to have IPv6 at home. Now that I’ve been making more use of cloud servers, first with Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service, and now adding Rackspace Cloud Servers, I’ve wanted IPv6 connectivity to those servers too. While both clouds have roadmap plans to add native IPv6 connectivity, I’m a little impatient, and can afford to make the conversion once each is ready with native service. So, I’ve expanded by my use of SixXS into each of those clouds as well.

As it happens, both Dell Cloud and Rackspace Cloud Servers are network-located in the Dallas, TX area, where SixXS also has a PoP. That means in both cases there’s only about a 2ms round trip time between my cloud servers and the PoP, which is an acceptable overhead. In configuring my cloud servers, I have requested a tunnel from SixXS, installed the aiccu program from the Linux distro repositories, and configured the /etc/aiccu.conf file with my credentials and tunnel ID. Voila – IPv6 connectivity! A quick update to /etc/sysconfig/ip6tables, and now my services are reachable through both IPv4 and IPv6. As each tunnel also comes with a whole routed /48 subnet as well, as I stand up more cloud servers in each location, I can route this subnet so I don’t have to configure separate tunnels for each server.

A seemingly minor feature was added to our 12G PowerEdge servers announced this week – IPMI interrupt handling. This is the culmination of work I started back in 2005 when we discovered that many actions utilizing IPMI, such as polling all the sensors for status during system startup, and performing firmware updates to the IPMI controller itself, took a very very long time. System startup could be delayed by minutes while OMSA polled the sensors, and firmware updates could take 15 minutes or more.

At the time, hardware rarely had an interrupt line hooked up to the Baseboard Management Controller, which meant we had to rely on polling the IPMI status register for changes. The polling interval, by default, was the 100Hz kernel timer, meaning we could transfer no more than 100 characters of information per second – reading a single sensor could take several seconds. To speed up the process, I introduced the “kipmi0″ kernel thread, which could poll much more quickly, but which PowerEdge users noted consumed far more CPU cycles than they would have liked.

Over time the Dell engineering team has made several enhancements to the IPMI driver to try to reduce the impact of the kipmi0 polling thread, but it could never be quite eliminated – until now.

With the launch of the 12G PowerEdge servers, we have a hardware interrupt line from the BMC hooked up and plumbed through the device driver. This eliminates the need for the polling thread completely, and provides the best IPMI command performance while not needlessly consuming CPU cycles polling.

Congratulations to the Dell PowerEdge and Linux Engineering teams for finishing this effort!

Back in 2001, I created the first GPG signing key for Dell, which the Linux Engineering team used to sign various packages and releases over time. I’ve long since handed day-to-day use of that key over to the Product Group Release Engineering team. They have issued a new stronger key which they will be using to sign future packages. I have signed this new key, and it has been signed by the original 2001 key as well, to provide continuity in the web of trust. The new key is on the usual keyservers, fingerprint:

After a long time hosting my personal web site at WestHost, I finally decided to move it to another cloud provider – a Rackspace Cloud Server. This move gives me a chance to run Fedora 16, as I do at home everywhere, and which is more than capable of serving a few light traffic domains, personal mail and mailing lists, and email for our neighborhood youth basketball league.

One thing that surprised me though was that the default Fedora 16 image provided by Rackspace in their smallest configuration (256GMB RAM, 10GB storage) had SELinux disabled, and no selinux-policy package installed. Being a big fan of Mark Cox’s work reporting on vulnerabilities in RHEL, and Josh Bressers work leading the Fedora Security Response Team, it just didn’t feel right running an internet-facing Fedora server without having SELinux enabled.

This was easily enough resolved by installing the selinux-policy-targeted package, editing /etc/grub.conf to remove selinux=0 from the kernel command line, enabling the configuration in /etc/selinux/config, and restarting the server. After a few minutes of autorelabeling, all is well and good.

I’m sure SELinux can get in the way of some application deployments. It’s easiest for Rackspace to keep it disabled, letting experienced folks like myself enable it if they want. I would have preferred it to be enabled by default, as there’s always the option to disable it later or run in permissive mode.

Because I run a few mailing lists using mailman, across multiple domains, I of course wanted to run several separate instances of mailman, one for each domain. Fedora has a SELinux-aware mailman package just a quick yum install away. The problem is, the SELinux file context rules are written expecting only one instance of mailman per server. That’s when I remembered a recent blog post by Dutch where he had patched the mailman spec and config files to build separate mailman-${sitename} RPMs, each with their own correct SELinux contexts. Very cool, and exactly what I needed. Well, almost – he did his work on EL6, I’m running Fedora 16, but close enough (see his blog comments for the few changes necessary on F16). Thanks to Dutch, I’ve got a fully SELinux-secured web and mail server with separate mailman instances for each domain.

Next time you build a Rackspace Cloud Server running Fedora, take an extra couple minutes and enable SELinux. The site you save may be your own!

If you’re like me, you dread the weeks shortly after Back To School. Sure, the kids are now settled into their daily routines, evening homework, Fall sports and Scouting, but with the start of the new school year comes the start of Fall Fundraising by each and every organization you’re fortunate enough to be a part of or even nearby. Each organization worthy in its own right, and as active participants, you bet we’re going to donate.

But did you know you can double your money? Yep! For every dollar you donate to a familiar charity, Dell will match that donation dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000/year per employee. This is an amazing benefit, which I had long put on my Tell Dell survey wishlist, and starting about 7 years ago (maybe more?) it became reality.

Now, there’s one little catch – you can’t simply hand over a check to your familiar charity and let them get it doubled. You must send your donation through the Dell internal web site (internal home page, You and Dell, Employee Giving), pay via credit card or payroll deduction (or if you’re particularly generous, stock donation), and in a few weeks Dell sends a check for 2x your amount to the charity. Relatively painless, and a fantastic benefit. You can give to a bunch of charities, or a few; a little (minimum $25), or a lot (up to $10k matched) any time during the year. The $10k match resets on January 1.

In addition, Dell wants to encourage employees to volunteer their time, as well as give their money, to charitable causes. Are you a Scout leader? A coach? A board member? Maybe you help out at the library or at church. However you volunteer is up to you. In recognition of your volunteer hours, Dell will give $150 each quarter (yep, that’s $600/year) to charities you designate (they don’t even have to be the same organizations you volunteer for if you want), as long as you log 10 or more hours of volunteer time in the quarter. So go to the tool (inside home page, You and Dell, Make a Difference), set up your charities, and log your hours. Then it’s free money for the charities you choose.

So, don’t let that Free Money pass you by. You know the charities need it, and it’s a simple benefit on top of the activities you’re up to your neck in already. Take a few minutes to double your contributions, and send that $600 to folks who really need it.

Northwest Austin Youth Basketball Association (NWAYBA) registration deadline is only 3 weeks away. Register your 1st grader through High School player, and join us on the courts this Fall. Registration forms must be postmarked by October 16, but I’d appreciate it if you’d mail them sooner. Somehow I got roped onto the NWAYBA Board, as the Registrar. We’re expecting 400 players again this year. I’d prefer not to deal with 300 applications in the last week.

On Saturday, September 24th, the boys of Cub Scout Pack 2 will be in the Doss Teachers’ Parking lot from 8a until 12p for final collections before delivering the food and goods to those in need. Firefighers with a Fire Engine from the City of Austin Fire Department will join us at Doss from 9-11am, work permitting.

Please demonstrate the generosity and caring of our neighborhood by joining Cub Scout Pack 2 in collecting the following needed items for those impacted by the wildfires of the past several weeks:

Canned food items

Dishwashing soap

Diapers and wipes (all sizes)

Hand sanitizer

Eye drops

Bandages

Neosporin/triple anti-biotic cream

gift cards or cash which will be converted to HEB gift cards

Boys from Pack 2 have been and will be in uniform at Doss each day September 19th through the 23rd to collect your donations. So far several truckloads of items have been collected.

OpenStack Community Manager Stephen Spector posted the OpenStack Conference Call for Speakers just a bit ago. I’m pleased to be a part of the Program Committee for this conference, and encourage you to submit your presentation ideas. There are two basic tracks, Business and Technical, and each session is planned to last only 30 minutes (so be concise!).

I look forward to meeting more members of the OpenStack community in Boston, October 5-7. I love Boston in the Fall (or really anytime…).

I’ve been a member on Identi.ca – the open source microblogging platform, for 3 years now. I’ve amassed 166 subscribers, and subscribe to 130 people there.

I’ve been on Google+ for a week now. In both “in my circles” and “I’m in their circles”, I’ve got almost exactly 2x what I’ve gathered from Identi.ca in 3 years. My “Linux” circle alone has nearly 200, more than everyone I converse with on Identi.ca, even though nearly all my identi.ca friends are members in identi.ca’s target audience – the Linux & Open Source community.

Don’t get me wrong. I am an ardent fan of open source software, and the open source development model. Evan Prodromo and the folks at status.net have done a great job. However, using the “go where the users are” yardstick, I think they’re coming up short. At a blogging conference in Austin a few months ago, I made the point of asking every analytical software vendor there – folks like Radian6, when they planned to add status.net / identi.ca support into their platforms. By my count, I was the only one in the room that had even heard of them.

Google, Status.net and other key contributors to the OpenSocial Foundation serve a key role – building open specifications and APIs to be able to exchange data across social networking sites. I hope the forthcoming promised Google+ APIs will be based on OpenSocial, which will give both credibility and teeth to the effort, and will encourage the more open sharing of our content across multiple social sites. I expect integration between Google+ and Identi.ca will be a first fruit.